TORONTO STAR: November 9, 2003
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Lounging in the president’s office or sitting in the prisoner’s dock facing genocide charges. These are plausible future scenarios for ex-dictator and presidential candidate General Efraín Ríos Montt after this Sunday’s national elections in Guatemala. The alternative futures for Guatemalans are equally stark: a return to the darkest period of Guatemala’s tragic modern history or a continuation of the tiny steps forward since the brutal civil war officially ended in 1996.
Rios Montt is the candidate of the Guatemalan Republican Front (FRG), which has ruled the country since 1999. Rios Montt would likely have become president in the 1999 elections except the Constitution banned coup leaders from the country’s top post. Instead fellow legislators made him the powerful head of the national Congress, a significant consolation given the immunity it provided from prosecution for genocide charges that indigenous groups and Nobel Peace Prize laureate Rigoberto Menchu are trying to bring against him. And now a fanciful re-interpretation of the Constitution by some of Rios Montt’s friends on the country’s highest court has cleared a path for him to the presidency. A victory in these elections will likely mean continuing immunity for Ríos Montt, both because courts are notoriously corrupt and because the Congress would protect him.
The reminders of Ríos Montt’s first reign in office in the 1980s are still being exhumed. In 1999, a United Nations Truth Commission, after a lengthy investigation, concluded that 200,000 civilians were murdered, almost all of them by government forces, during the 36-year war. The bloodiest period of the killing according to the Commission’s report, entitled Memory of Silence, was during Ríos Montt’s dictatorship between March 1982 and August 1983.
As an investigator for that UN Commission I got to know Ríos Montt indirectly. We followed his army’s footsteps through the rugged highlands of Guatemala, near the border with Chiapas, Mexico. On July 15, 1982, for instance, 250 soldiers arrived in the village of Petanac. After finding evidence of a recent guerrilla presence, the villagers were ordered to gather in the village centre. The men were machine-gunned to death. The women and children were herded into a village hut, which was set ablaze. We recorded the names of 68 victims, including 18 children. “Taking the water from fish”, is what his military called this type of operation to eliminate actual and potential guerrilla support.
The army passed through several other villages on that sweep. They brought a hooded prisoner — a captured guerrilla, they said — to some villages. The prisoner was ordered to point out sympathizers. The lucky ones were shot and killed. Others were made to kneel in front of villagers who were forced to take turns hacking the purported sympathizers — actually their neighbours, sons, or brothers — with their machetes. One witness explained the dilemma to me. “Some of us hit them lightly because we didn’t want to cut them too badly but others hit them hard because they thought that would bring death more quickly.”
The documented history of the bloodshed gives Rios Montt a strong incentive to attain the presidency, and avoid his accusers. And even though the polls show him in third place among presidential candidates leading up to Sunday’s first ballot, no experienced observer discounts his chances. His supporters are primarily in poor rural areas where telephones to answer pollsters questions are rare. Even if he loses the first ballot, he may be able to land alliances that will give him a majority on the second in December.
Rios Montt certainly has some effective ways to make sure he does well in the elections. And when you have a few hundred massacres on your resume, a little electoral manipulation is will not damage your reputation.
First, the FRG will continue to rely on the persuasiveness of terror. Fear is a good motivator. The town of Rabinal is a good example of the tactic. On the same day in July of this summer that the community exhumed the bodies of civilians massacred by the army in the 1980s, Ríos Montt showed up on a campaign visit. Local people hurled garbage and stones at him. The next day the army arrived to take over. The message was clear. If you don’t support my party then we can always return to the military violence of the good old days.
Second, Ríos Montt and the FRG are making sure that the conditions surrounding Sunday’s election favour their own rural support base. Last month the government passed emergency legislation amending the Labour Code to ban all productive activity on November 8, 9, and 10, the days before, during, and after the election. The purpose is to encourage better off urban voters, who largely support other parties, to escape cities for a short holiday while transport is freed up to bring poor rural voters to polling stations, often located in far-off municipal capitals, where they will also be fed and lodged.
Finally, the FRG has passed legislation to compensate thousands of members of the Civil Defense Patrols. The men were obliged to serve voluntarily in the patrols during the war to combat the guerrilla. Compensation has already been paid to some of them, but most of the payments will be made after the election … provided voters make the right choice.
Rios Montt, a devout evangelical, does enjoy a certain populist image. Even Ronald Reagan once lauded Rios Montt as “totally committed to democracy” and the victim of a “bum rap” from the media, even as the CIA was documenting his army’s atrocities. Today, Ríos Montt promises to deal with the country’s high crime rate with a firm hand. There is obvious irony in his pledge not only because the reigning lawlessness and violence is at least partly attributable to continuing infrastructure of terror that Rios Montt and the FRG have promoted.
Since the FRG took power in 1999, government corruption has increased substantially. Crime has also continued to increase. An estimated 60 people are murdered in the capital city each week. Threatening to kill your opponents — especially judges, peasant leaders, and human rights activists — has again become a preferred form of national discourse. Clandestine groups with suspected links to the army or police have re-emerged.
A rejection of Rios Montt at the polls, however, will not in itself solve any of the country’s longstanding problems, including widespread poverty, high illiteracy, and the world’s third worst distribution of wealth. Much of that wealth — primarily agricultural land on which half of the country’s workforce relies — is owned by a small elite. It is this inequity that helped plunge the country into civil war in the first place. However, the main backer of the leading opposition party is, the traditional association of landowning, commercial, and banking interests that comprise the country’s traditional oligarchy. We all win with GANA is the party’s slogan. It’s a nice play on the Spanish verb to win but when a proposal was recently made to raise the country’s low minimum wage, CACIF vigourously opposed it. Ríos Montt has promised to take power away from this oligarchy but he doesn’t mention that the likely beneficiaries will be his military supporters — many of whom have diversified into fields like drug trafficking since the end of the war.
Julio Ceren, a member of the Guatemala Community Network in Toronto and an exile from Guatemala’s political violence, acknowledges the limited options presented by the political parties. He notes that none of the contenders even mentions land distribution, even though it was in the Peace Accords. Nonetheless he says, “a victory by Ríos Montt would put the country back 30 years” while a win by one of the other parties will at least make popular struggle possible. And he says that the possibility of bringing Rios Montt to justice is an important step in attacking the “infrastructure of terror” that has kept Guatemalan civil society from uniting and moving forward. If Rios Montt falls then it will be the start of many dominoes falling behind him and the terror that underlies their control can thereby be weakened.
Indeed, there have been a few signs of progress since the end of the war. Popular organizations have again been able to organize, even though they are under continuing threat from clandestine groups. And a recent agreement between national and international institutions to investigate the clandestine groups has been negotiated and will soon begin.
Guatemalans may not have a lot to choose from in the upcoming elections, but the wrong choice will make the road ahead look a lot steeper.
